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They hadn’t missed her yet. The affiance. On the first meeting between the partners, the bride-soon-to-be was supposed to feign a demure reluctance. But soon they would wonder what was taking her so long with her clips, or her veil, or her garland, and the unmarried girls would be sent to look. They would be sent to look, and a kilometre and a half away on a grassy knoll she realised she had not thought what to do when they did not find her. It was a big thing to realise. It lay in her stomach like morning hunger, or the sway when a train hits a set of points you aren’t expecting, or magic hour moments when the edge of the world is just over the sun and the sandstone fingers of the Big Vermilion country are still glowing with the heat of it—you can feel it on your face—and the sky is so blue it aches.

Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th, the feeling said, at this moment, you are free to do one of two things. You can get up from this bank and go to your cabin and put on your clips and your veil and your garland and go out there to meet your husband-to-be. You can get up from this bank and go to that terrain bike over there and take that bike and this boy and go wherever you want in the world. That’s it. That’s your two choices. Sorry there ain’t no more. That’s your lot.

Sweetness put down the glasses, but it wasn’t readjustment to new perspectives that made the world swim around her. It was those two and two-only choices, and the certainty that in this moment, she had to decide. The world went white. Certainty blinded her.

Sweetness suddenly found words inside her. She did not want to have to think too much about them, because that might have killed them, so she opened her mouth and let them come out. They tasted like something she was spitting up, strong and biley, something she had to get out of her.

“Hey Serpio.”

“What?” He had been reaching for the glasses, but Sweetness rolled on to her back and looked at the sky.

“You hate it.”

“What?”

“Here. This. You hate it. I hate it. So let’s go.”

“You mean?”

“Let’s go. Now. Why not?” Thinking: Hurry up, get on with it, say yes, don’t keep asking stupid questions because each one eats a bit of that blinding white certainty and I don’t want to have to go back there, I don’t want to be married and have a stainless steel kitchen and no, I don’t know what’s going to be out there with you, but I do know that it’s none of that back there. And this is a very very very long moment indeed.

She saw his lips open. It was like a replay on the pelota, but with a tiny rope of saliva between tooth and top lip that caught the sun.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

And so they ran away.

But it wasn’t that quick, or clean. You don’t just run away. People who do that on the Deuteronomy trampas end up raven-picked and windpolished. Even an Engineer girl knew this.

Timetabling made the raid easier. Engineers and Stuards were hither and thither, up-track and down, but North East Quartersphere regional control had stuff backed up all the way to Grand Valley and a railroad to run, God damn it, so all the running around was against a backdrop of track-mending gear folding itself neatly into its manifolds and tokamaks firing up in impressive gouts of steam and crews swinging themselves perilously on to companionways as cranks turned and wheels ground. Marshals with red flags and whistles backed trains up to the sidings and engaged in impressive feats of impromptu shunting as intercities nudged past slow freighters and priority diplomatic transports slipped in ahead of big chemical processors. In the confusion of steam and costumes, Sweetness could slip up the Number Twelve access ladder, over the top of the water tender, wriggle down the relief pipe that no one over the age of ten could ever make it down, along the midway and through the open porthole of her cabin unseen.

Kilometres later, she would also be amazed about how simple the choice of items was. Two hundred and twenty-seven dollars rolled up in a waterproof can. A jingle of change, though it was heavy and rolled too easily out of pockets. A torch. An all-weather lighter. A pen and a little paper. A fistful of tampons. A leather-bound copy of The Evyn Psalmody that Grandmother Taal had marked up in red highlighter. A Bakelite cat—quite small, but dense—that she knew would never forgive her if she left it behind. Some glue, and a small screwdriver. Shampoo. Water purifying tablets. BootsT-shirtslongpantsshortpantsposh frock(in case) glovesgoodsocks. A long-fingered comb. A gold filling, to sell. Sachet mint tea, sachet ersatz coffee (appropriated from Stuard country). Tin mug. Spoonknifefork, folding. A whistle, in case she really couldn’t trust Serpio. A decent blade, partially ditto. A little solar wireless. Something unimproving to read. Remembering the advice of the green man of Inatra, a toothbrush and at least one change of underwear. Her charm, to watch over her. An emergency spell, a sixth birthday special from Psalli, purchased with many frissons and some guilt from Mammy Wulu the Budget Witch of Belladonna Main.

It all looked very small in the bottom of her black everything-proof bag, precious little eggs in a dark nest. But it had been easy. Just reach out and take it. The thought had been put in long before. Some quarantined fold of her mind had been planning this for years.

Something else. Oh yes. Her smelly sleepsack. And food. It might be a while before she got something to eat.

Voices and distant whistlings from beneath her porthole told her Catherine of Tharsis’s people were still abroad, trying to search the other trains for the runaway fiancée before they pulled out. She listened a second at the hatch of her cabin, then darted swiftly down the dark wood-lined corridor to the Domiety refectory. As ever, Sle and Rother’am had left all the stuff with no meat or that was in some way healthy. It all went into four greaseproof paper bags, and, with six bottles of oxygenated water, into the bag.

Those ten items suddenly made it heavy enough to root her to the spot.

The bright certainty was fading. One moment more of this greasy, scored wall panelling, that ingrained sweat of hot fat and onions, those smeary framed photographs of Great Trains passing over Photogenic Terrain, that phlegmy rattle of the neon wireless on the window-sill, those cheery plastic condiment bottles in the shapes of smiling vegetables with their crusted necklaces of dried drips, and she would be trapped forever. Pickled like a festal egg.

“Sweet?”

Too slow. You lost it.

Cock piss bugger bum balls. It had to be Romereaux, standing in the doorway with his mouth open in a way that told her without words he had worked it all out in one glimpse.

“Don’t.” She held up a warning finger.

“Sweet, where are you…”

“Don’t say another word.”

She backed away from him.

“Don’t try and stop me, don’t try and talk me out of it. I’m not marrying Stainless Steel Kitchen. I’ve got a life waiting for me.”

“Sweet, I just wanted…”

“Shut.”

“Wanted to say…”

“Up. Shut up.”

“To say, good luck.”

It was so wrong a thing for him to say that she was halfway to the door before the double-take hit. She turned.

“What?”

“Good luck.”

“You’re supposed to try to stop me. You’re supposed to have arguments about how hurt everyone will be, and the honour of the family, and the disgrace I’ll bring on everyone and they’ll all have to go round with their hair uncut for three years. When that doesn’t work, you’re supposed to ask me if I know what I’m doing and do I know where I’m going and that it’s a big wild world out there and I’ll get very hurt very fast, and I’ll come crawling back like that. And when I say I’ve got it all sorted, you’re supposed to go all soft and say you’ll miss me and that you’ve always really loved me, and that you had this brilliant plan to buy out the contract and we’d have our own train and go off in a cloud of steam into the sunset and we’ll found our own Domiety and one day they’ll name a station after us and that’ll stop me for ten, maybe twenty seconds—if you’ve played it right—and I’ll say something like, well, I always loved you too, like for years, since you were this size and I was that size and all those years, we never knew it, and now it’s too late because I’ve got to go, I’ve got a life waiting for me, and I turn around and walk right out of here and that’s it.”